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MetaMask account hacked for ~$40k. Funds got routed to a >$20m dollar account. Is it a massive ring? A money laundering service?

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by COINS NEWS 124 Views

Before anyone says anything, yes I know I'm an idiot for not using a hardware wallet for such a large amount. Yes, I know it's as good as gone. No, I did not share my recovery phrase or secret with anyone or sent it to anyone or any website. I did import my private to the MetaMask extension, which I know is the valid version because I downloaded it from their website. I also did this nearly a year ago, yet my funds were only taken out of my account about a week ago. In fact, until just a couple days ago, the last time I even interacted with my account was over 3 months ago. Maybe it was malware, who knows. Either way I went ahead and nuked my computer (OSX) with a fresh reinstall.

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Essentially, I had ~$40k of DAI sitting on two separate addresses (both imported into MetaMask).

Around 7 days ago, this amount (and the little FTM i had sitting in one of those wallets) were stolen and transferred to a fresh address.

The only action that that wallet then do was convert all of the DAI to FTM before sending that to yet another fresh wallet which then proceeded to forward that FTM in 6 separate batches, all to the same third fresh wallet, which then forwarded all of those to a "final" address. "Final" because this last address has so much activity there is no way to trace which coins were "mine" anymore.

The "final" address is: https://ftmscan.com/address/0xde79ce4f78a20b324d057cdb348b558f0c2ced85

It has over $20m worth of assets. In fact, it is the 14th largest wallet on the FTM block chain.

What is this wallet?? Is it the owner of some massive scam ring? Is it a money laundering service? Is it actually a legitimate wallet, that the scammer somehow is using to clean his money? Is it an exchange's wallet? At this scale, is it worth contacting the authorities? The amount on the account is $20m now, but so much money is constantly flowing in and out of it I doubt it stops at just that.

I've tried using bitquery to track where the money is flowing but the graph gets so convoluted that it's almost impossible to make any sense out of it (perhaps thats why the scammer took so many hops to get to the "final" wallet).

Please see updates: the $20m account actually belongs to an exchange called OKX. The culprit does not seem to be part of a larger ring as I first expected, more likely actually just a small fry.

Of course if I can get my money back, that would make me the happiest boy in Springfield, but I am slowly coming to terms that it is gone forever. At the very least though I wish I could get some answers.

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Edit: Thanks for all the replies and advice. I'm going to stop replying now since I'm tired and am going to keep investigating using the tools shared with me. Let this be a warning to everyone, don't assume you are safe out of statistics. You don't have to be blatantly dumb to be taken :\ take security seriously.

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Update:

From those throwaway wallets that were used as an intermediary to that massive $20m account, I was able to view their transactions on a different chain, specifically the ETH chain and followed their transactions to an "OKX: Hot Wallet". Which seems to be a service that uses KYC?? I might actually have a lead on this guy after all!

I am starting to think this guy is a small fry and the $20m wallet is just an exchange wallet.

Further update:

Wow, I was way off from the beginning. This is no big operation. It's just some dude. The second hop is directly to OKX. The $20m account is probably part of OKX's operations! If I can get OKX to cooperate with me and I'm lucky they might have him KYC'd.

Another update:

Even better, I found both a crypto.com and some binance accounts connected to this address. Though these wallets are sending funds to the one I'm investigating, so they could either be the culprit, or another victim.

Feb 7:

As expected, OKX requires that I reach out to law enforcement before they will share any information. I'm filing a report now. Police report filed; let's see if anything comes out of this...

submitted by /u/daroons
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